I had an entire post written about what this last year has meant for me, the good and the bad, what I’m grateful for, etc… However, I don’t really write about anything personal here, I instead decided to take that post and send it as a personal email to a number of people who are close to me, and keep intimate communications intimate.

Instead, here’s a few things I think might be good advice for surviving this upcoming year if you “work in tech”. It’s a living list, so if you feel that I’ve overlooked something that might touch you, let me know and I’ll add to it.

1. If you start a new company, don’t make ad revenue it’s core business model. If you’re an adult, you should know better.
2. Don’t take a word and add “TW” to the beginning of it, it’s not cute and instead you’ll be an annoying and uncreative schmuck. This is an updated rule from last year’s “if the word ends in ‘ER’, don’t leave out the ‘E’”.
3. Don’t think for a second that people want to pay for content, they will however, pay for services. Now someone just needs to come up with better services.
4. If you build something, make sure it’s ACTUALLY useful, and not just cool and trite.
5. If you work at an agency and enjoyed reading “Getting Real”, please forget everything you read, those ideas work if you’re on the product side, and not client services… that book is no good for you, get a refund.
6. There’s no such thing as a social media expert. People can be experts in platforms and tactics and skills, but not in “social media”. I however am an expert is calling people out on misusing and abusing ambiguous terms and buzzwords. Like most buzzwords, it’s something most people don’t understand… when talking about it, I use the term ‘unmanaged (brand) communications’ because it actually describes what’s happening; people are talking about all sorts of stuff, sometimes it might be about you, and it sometimes happens on the internet.
7. SEO experts are a joke, you’ll never need one if you have a good information architect, a copywriter and someone who knows how to write good, semantic markup.
8. If you “follow” more than a few hundred people on ‘you-know-what’, you’re a dick and need to cut that crap out right now. It’s actually impossible to track more than 1000 people whether online or in the physical world. Quit fronting like you pay attention.
9. If you’re a strategist of some sort and don’t have any actual or physical deliverables as part of your work, reevaluate how you actually are a benefit your clients or get a new career. I don’t want to have to hunt you down and burn you at the stake, we don’t need more people selling snake oil and practicing brand voodoo.
10. No individual person is worth more than $150 per hour tops, if you disagree then you must be greedy, fleecing your clients, fleecing our industry, or all three.
11. Don’t waste your time getting excited about the new hot mobile device. They all suck, really. If you do need one, please recycle your old one and just buy the one that is the least painful for you to use.